Dinosaurs and the Bible ("Debunking the 7 Myths that Deny Biblical Truth" Series)

Myth Seven: Dinosaurs in the Biblical Timeline

Myth number seven is, dinosaurs died out millions of years ago, did not walk with man, and are not mentioned in the Bible. Many people have asked, where did dinosaurs fit into the biblical timeline? And what does the Bible say about dinosaurs?

Yes, the Bible does mention dinosaurs, even specifically. But before we get there, let's take a quick look at the big picture. Evolution holds that dinosaurs evolved 220 million years ago and died about 65 million years ago from any of a number of possible extinction events.

Dinosaurs Created on the Sixth Day and Destroyed in Noah's Flood

But the Bible teaches that all land animals, including dinosaurs, were created on the sixth day of creation, just thousands of years ago. And they were all named by Adam just before God handed over his completed creation to Adam and Eve, charging them to take dominion over his completed creation.

Then, about 4 ,400 years ago, the entire world was deluged by Noah's flood and the dinosaurs, along with billions of other creatures, were wiped out. Let's take a quick look at some evidences that show that the biblical account might actually be true.

Dinosaur Design, Fossil Beds, and the Global Flood

First, dinosaurs are cleverly designed. Consider this triceratops. Its 2 ,000-pound head is mounted in a way that allows it to turn every which way, yet still be strong enough to ram something, even while running.

What about massive ceropods with weight-bearing systems from hip to toe that allow its 200 ,000-pound body to even walk, and neck vertebrae that are 90 filled with air so it can lift up its head? Next, there's the absence of dinosaur ancestors and transitions.

Even the Chicago Field Museum sign admits there have been zero transitions between dinosaur kinds. It shows question marks regarding where they came from. It's almost like someone just put each basic kind on Earth right at the same time.

There are even dinosaur design features that show they lived in the ideal pre-flood world. Pterodactyls may have been too heavy to fly in today's atmosphere. Same with huge pre-flood dragonflies. The fossil record is filled with giant creatures and plants.

We know this because there are billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the Earth. And when we look at the dinosaur fossil record, we see that they were buried furiously, rapidly, and simultaneously, oftentimes found fleeing in groups.

Take this massive bone bed in Hilda, Canada. Thousands of centrosaurs were catastrophically buried over an entire square mile. Or this one in China, where thousands of different kinds of dinosaurs were simultaneously buried in a single 980-foot-long ravine.

There are hundreds of dinosaur bone beds all over the world, including the U .S. where the Morrison Formation covers 13 states and 700 ,000 square miles. Thousands of torn-apart dinosaurs are buried here in hundreds of mass graves, with many found in the classic death pose with their necks arched back, choking as they died.

Museum signs everywhere even admit they died in a watery catastrophe. Some dinosaurs are even found mummified, with tree leaves, flowers, ferns, shrubs, and algae still in their stomach. Dinosaurs are even found buried with marine creatures.

Isn't a global flood the best explanation for this? Scientists have been discovering soft tissue in dinosaur bones. They describe blood cells, blood vessels, connective tissue, and even collagen, which has a maximum shelf life of about 900 ,000 years at 40 degrees.

With a maximum shelf life of less than 1 million years, what's collagen doing in dinosaur bones that are supposedly 65 million years old? Many dinosaur bones are even found unfossilized in places like Madagascar, Alaska, and Montana.

Does this evidence seem to support the Bible's recent and violent flood, or evolution stories? But some would say, if the Bible includes the truth about Earth history, it would specifically mention dinosaurs.

Behemoth in Job 40 as a Dinosaur

Well, the term dinosaur wasn't even invented until 1841, and Bible translations before this time used the term dragon over 35 times, in many contexts describing dinosaur-like creatures. Job chapter 40 describes a majestic creature using the name behemoth, which means colossal beast.

In context, Job and his philosopher friends just finished over 30 chapters of dialogue trying to explain God and why he would allow such hardships into Job's life. Then God shows up in a whirlwind, tells Job to brace himself like a man, and says that he would be the one asking Job the questions for a while.

Then for four chapters straight, God asks Job 77 rhetorical questions that all have to do with creation. After explaining to Job that he is the master designer of space and Earth, God describes 13 of his created animals, such as an ostrich, horse, and deer, then caps off the discussion by telling Job about his two grandest creations, behemoth and leviathan.

God calls behemoth the first of all his ways, meaning the first in rank, the chief, the most supreme of his creative works. In context, God is saying to Job, sit down, brace yourself, and now I will tell you of the chief of all my works, the biggest, most amazing land creature I ever made.

When we scan through all land-dwelling creatures, both living and extinct, which one comes up as the first in rank, the most colossal, or the chief? Clearly the sauropod dinosaur. Pairing God's word that behemoth is the grandest creature he ever made with the fact that sauropods are the largest land creatures we've ever found should give us a clue to behemoth's identity.

Sauropods were huge. The largest one found to date was over 120 feet long, that's 10 freeway lanes across. At a weight of 76 tons, it's a wonder these creatures could even walk. In fact, Dr. Waddell was granted an international award for discovering one of the secrets behind how their mobility was even possible.

Their bones were pneumatic, they were charged with air. Dr. Waddell notes they were marvels of biological engineering and that efficiency of design is especially evident in their vertebrae, the bones that make up the backbone.

It turns out their vertebrae was increasingly lighter, higher up the spinal column, and were filled with air, some up to 90%.

When Matt puts sauropod backbones through a CT scanner, he finds a real surprise. The x-ray slices from the CT scans reveal not marrow, but a honeycomb pattern inside the dinosaurs' back and neck bones, filled only with air.

Matt's work shows that the bigger dinosaurs got, the more air they had in their vertebrae.

This is one neck vertebra from Supersaurus.

A neck bone like this would have been light enough for one man to lift. The same size mammal bone would require a forklift.

We found that the biggest of these sauropods, the vertebrae were about 90 air. So that's comparable to styrofoam.

So the bigger the dinosaurs got, the more air sac-like structures running into the bone.

Absolutely.

While this may solve the puzzle of how they could lift and move their massive heads and necks, it doesn't solve the challenge of how they could possibly inhale enough oxygen through their tiny nostrils, which were only about twice the size of those on a living.

Horse.

Perhaps they thrived better in a world before Noah's flood when the oxygen levels were likely higher. Their long necks and tails resembled living suspension bridges. For this creature to eat, breathe, and move its long neck, the series of over 12 neck vertebrae had to be interlocking and twistable.

They also had to have anchoring points in just the right places for muscles and ligaments to connect in such a way to prevent the neck from pinching veins and nerves and to brace the trachea and esophagus.

God even describes behemoth's diet, eating grass like an ox. In 2005, researchers found grass and sauropod coprolites in India. And some paleobotanists are even saying that this will cause a rewrite in our understanding of dinosaur evolution because evolution holds that grass didn't evolve until millions of years after the dinosaurs had gone extinct.

God describes behemoth's strength in his hips and power in his stomach muscles. Again, we have a strong clue that behemoth was a sauropod dinosaur because, while many animals have strong hips and stomach muscles, none were as strong as the sauropod.

The muscle structure around the hips and stomach that were necessary for sauropods to move, walk, turn, and eat would be incredible. In fact, for some sauropods, like the Diplodocus, its highest point of its core body was the hips and its whole body balanced on the hips, front to back.

Diplodocus was able to rear up on its back legs and balance on its tail like a tripod, making use of the hips to support not just the back half of its body but the front half.

Too.

This required enormous strength in the hip and stomach muscles considering they lifted tons of its own body into the air. Below the hips was an incredible weight distribution system that went from a massive femur, which in some cases was about 8 feet long, to two shin bones, then to five toes.

Behemoth's tail also closely matches those of sauropods. God describes that he moves his tail like a cedar tree and follows this by stating the sinews of his thighs are tightly knit. Paleontologists have learned from muscle attachment locations in their bones that the tightly knit structure of Behemoth's thighs and hips actually made his tail sway from side to side with each step, much as a cedar tree does when it sways in the wind.

Tail drag marks are only rarely found behind sauropod footprints, indicating their tails were raised while they walked. It's difficult to think of a creature that fits this biblical description better than a sauropod dinosaur.

God describes his bones like beams of bronze. Most Bible versions translate this phrase as tubes of bronze, conduits of bronze, or pipes of brass, which conveys both strength and being hollow like a channel or a tube.

This matches the fact that sauropods have the largest leg bones of any animal, and they are in fact just like tubes of metal, having a hard outer casing and spongy marrow and veins on the inside. Then God says that its ribs are like bars of iron.

Unlike much of sauropod's skeleton that was spongy and filled with air for weight savings, its ribs were fully ossified. They were made out of solid bone. Again, we have a perfect match. God even describes Behemoth's habitat.

He lies under the lotus trees, in a covert of reeds and marsh. The lotus trees cover him with their shade, and the willows by the brook surround him. This was a creature that had to be near lots of green food, living in a lush, tropical environment.

Large sauropods had to eat half a ton of vegetation every day, and they likely had to eat all day long to consume this amount of food. Next God says that indeed the river may rage, yet he is not disturbed.

He is confident, though the Jordan gushes into his mouth. Why would God point out that this animal can stand in a rushing river? Lots of animals can do this, depending on the size of the rushing river.

In this case, God said the river may rage, yet he is not disturbed, and that Behemoth is confident even though this raging river should gush into his mouth. The Jordan River is the largest river in Palestine, and it currently flows at only 15 of the rate it flowed in the past.

Even so, in the winter, this river would be incredibly difficult to cross, and it would take a very sizable animal to stand undisturbed in this rushing current and even more, let the current gush into its mouth.

Some of the larger sauropods stood over 20 feet at the shoulders and weighed over 70 tons. Creatures of this size and mass could withstand a raging river better than any others. Even with all this evidence, some say that Behemoth was just a mythical creature.

But why would God try to display his awesome creative power by describing something that never existed? Anyone can do that. And why would God say that Behemoth was the chief of all his creations after describing 13 real, still-living animals in the same passage?

Why go through all the trouble to describe Behemoth as a grass-eating animal that lies peacefully in the shadow of the river plants along with his physical description, diet, and habitat, all of which happen to fit a known creature, a sauropod dinosaur?

Certain Bible footnotes state that Behemoth was a hippo or an elephant, but neither comes close to matching all 13 characteristics God used to describe Behemoth. Certainly hippos and elephants aren't the first in rank or chief of God's creations.

Would God tell Job to gird up his loins, to behold the chief of his creations, just to show off a hippo, an elephant? These creatures were plentiful. They also don't have tails that sway like cedar trees, and both of these animals have been captured and killed by man throughout history.

But God says that only Behemoth's creator can approach him, that he cannot be captured by humans when he is on watch, and that no one can use barbs to pierce his nose. These impossibilities fit sauropod dinosaurs better than any other animals because of their towering heads and huge size.

With a head that reached over 40 feet high, it could also see people coming from far away. Its massive tail also makes him unapproachable. Based on what we know from fossils, some sauropods could cover a 200-foot circle with deadly force using their tails, which could be over 50 feet long and weigh over 13 ,000 pounds.

Recent studies have shown that some sauropods could probably create sonic booms with their tails, just like a whip. It's not by chance that God says to Job that Behemoth can only be approached by his creator.

Good luck even getting near this creature to put a snare in its nose. To this day, elephants and hippos are surrounded by hunters and killed, but sauropods better fit this passage because they are simply unapproachable.

God says that he made Behemoth, along with man, like during the same creation week, not millions of years ago. God made Adam as the last of his creations and gave him dominion over all the animals that had just been created during creation week, not just some of the creatures.

Why else would God tell Job to consider or behold a creature which no human had ever.

Seen?

Soft Tissue, Ancient Art, and the Case for a Recent Flood

Just in the last 20 years, over 50 articles have been published in scientific journals that have documented 14 bio-organic materials in dinosaur bones that simply cannot be millions of years old. These include blood vessels, red blood cells, hemoglobin, bone cells, ovalbumin, chitin, unmineralized bone, collagen, limited DNA, skin pigments, fex proteins, histones, keratin, and elastin.

Just 20 years ago, most scientists simply assumed dinosaur bones were solid mineralized impressions of bones, but modern science has now revealed that many of the dinosaur bones are original, even at the molecular level.

This is a spectacular excavation site. They work in an area of remote grasslands where dinosaur bones literally cover the ground. An ancient graveyard where an unusually large number of dinosaurs died and were entombed by mud flows that preserve their bones.

The preservation is unbelievable. The quality of the material is exceptional. This is a piece of bone from the Madagascar locality. It, in many regards, doesn't even look like a fossil. This is typical of the Madagascar material.

It is not heavily stained. It's not been invested with iron, with manganese. It doesn't look like a typical fossil. If you didn't know, you might think you're picking up a cow bone today, a bleached cow.

Bone.

I was looking at this thing thinking, this is really interesting.

It was the inside of the T. rex bone that fascinated Schweitzer, who made thin sections out of it. And in these cross sections of fossilized bone, she saw something that she and everyone else had thought was impossible, round structures that looked like red blood cells, dinosaur blood cells.

Inside those channels where the blood vessels would have run were these little round red structures that were all kind of lined up like a train. And they were bright red and translucent. Nobody else had seen anything like that before.

The very idea of blood cells in a 70 million year old bone was more than unconventional. It was radical.

Nobody was imagining that dinosaurs might have had preserved soft tissues.

Derek Briggs is curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Peabody Museum at Yale University. So along comes Mary Schweitzer and she's starting to look inside dinosaur bones and has made this startling discovery about the presence of red blood cells.

What was your initial reaction to that?

Oh, I think the same reaction as everybody's, that this was totally improbable. She perhaps misinterpreted the evidence or was exaggerating the potential for what she was seeing.

So skeptical at first.

Oh yeah, definitely.

Why do you think it didn't occur to anybody?

Because we have this clear understanding that part of all biological cycles involves decay. I mean, nature is set up to break down that material and recycle it. So it's just improbable that those kinds of very delicate structures would survive, particularly for millions of years.

When you think about it, the laws of chemistry and biology and everything else that we know say that it should be gone. It should be degraded completely. This is not possible. Do it again. We got another piece of bone, we put it in the solution, we waited two or three or four weeks, looked again, more blood vessels.

We must have repeated that with probably 17 or 18 different fragments of bone.

Several ancient cultures have drawings and carvings of sauropod-like creatures. Look at this one from the Amazon rainforest that shows nine warriors hunting what appears to be a sauropod dinosaur. It even dates to around the time the Book of Job was likely written.

You can see these amazing pictographs here, allegedly over 5 ,000 years old. They definitely look authentic. I've seen pictographs all over the world. And we have a hunting scene here with a very large animal in the center.

Now we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine hunters. And you can see this hunter here is raising his spear, getting ready to spear this animal. Obviously, these people saw this animal alive.

They didn't dig up the bones, they saw it living, breathing. They were hunting this animal. Well, what is it? There's a lot of people that aren't sure what it is, but it sure looks like a dinosaur. It's got the long neck, the small head, the big body, and the large tail.

Some have suggested maybe this is a camelid, like a llama. But llamas don't have big, large tails like that. Many reptiles do. But according to the theory of evolution, dinosaurs went extinct at least 65 million years ago.

What in the world were people just over 5 ,000 years ago doing hunting them? The local secular archaeologist would not tell us what he believed the animal was on film. Off camera, he admitted that it was a dinosaur that survived extinction and lived alongside people.

Why did so many different cultures draw and paint the same type of creature? As a land-dwelling creature that breathed through its nose, Noah was commanded to bring these types of creatures onto the ark, as juveniles, of course, and many likely survived for some centuries after the flood.

Why the Bible's History of Creation and the Flood Matters

When it comes to human history, to bridge the gap between 4 ,000 to 5 ,000 years ago and the distant past beyond this time, we each have two choices. Rely on God who was there and told us what happened, or trust in carbon -14 dating and other types of radiometric dating beyond 100 ,000 years.

Choosing between these two histories is no small matter. You see, people won't allow God's word to shape their daily lives or guide them in their eternal choices if they don't believe it's historically or scientifically credible.

God's timeless word lays out Earth's initially perfect creation, the fall, the flood, and life afterwards. The New Testament describes Christ as the only way to be reconciled to God and live with Him in eternity.

His timeless word gives us a clear testimony about when He created the world and the creatures that were present in the original creation, plus some of His magnificent creatures that survived after the flood.

Why would God dedicate one of His longest animal descriptions to Behemoth, calling Him the Chief? Could it be to reassure Christians today that His word really is true, permanent, and dependable, and the viewpoint offered by the world is not?

Are you a Christian student looking for answers about what the Bible teaches about creation, the fossil record, dinosaurs? Download the Genesis Apologetics app from the iTunes or Google Play stores for answers to these questions and more.